UA's takeover of WHIL will mean the end of the Alaprint radio reading service.

In March of this year, it was announced that Mobile's Spring Hill College would be selling its venerable public radio station, WHIL, to the University of Alabama for $1.1 million.  In June it was discovered that the station would be picking up the Alabama Public Radio network programming from Tuscaloosa, eliminating the need for the college's studios and staff.  With this change, an important but mostly unknown service will also be going away: Alaprint.

Alaprint is a non-profit organization that has, over the years, provided a spoken-word broadcast for the blind and print-impaired in Mobile.  The service has been carried on WHIL's SCA (subsidiary communications authority) channel, which is available to listeners with special radio equipment that's usually provided at no charge by the reading service.

With the elimination of the studios at Spring Hill College, the Alaprint service will no longer have a place to operate, meaning they will be unable to record or broadcast their programming.  This will displace approximately 500 blind and print-impaired listeners in the Mobile and Baldwin County areas.

Radio reading services have been around since the late 1960's, when the Minnesota Radio Talking Book Network was established using the Minnesota Public Radio Network's SCA channels.  Since then, various local and regional organizations have sprung up across the country to serve the needs of the nation's blind and print-impaired.  In 1982, New Orleans became the first city in the US to host a FM radio station dedicated to reading services.  Currently, there's just one other FM dedicated to radio reading, and that's WYPL in Memphis, owned by the Memphis library system.  The calls stand for "We're Your Public Library".  WYPL also lays claim to being the only 100,000 watt station in the US dedicated to radio reading and is the only library owned station in the country, too.

Although New Orleans' WRBH and Memphis' WYPL are going strong, print reading services in Alabama aren't faring so well due to lack of support and budget cutbacks.  The Alabama Public Radio network has operated a radio reading service, but it's slated for closure at some point in the future, and WBHM's Alabama Radio Reading Service is also going away on September 1st.

It's a shame that such a useful service is dying due to lack of monetary support, but with most markets supporting less than 1,000 listeners, the costs cannot be justified by many public radio stations.  While the internet has opened up new avenues for the blind and print-impaired, especially with specialist browsers like WebbIE, they can be cumbersome to use.  Most websites are not always optimized for screen readers, which can lead to readability problems or a total lack of access.  (While ABMP is not screen reader optimized, viewers can use the mobile home page which bypasses all scripting.)  Internet services also depend on a computer with reliable internet access, which some print-impaired people may not be able to afford or easily operate.  With broadcast radio reading services, program material is available to anyone with a compatible radio, often provided for free to qualified individuals.  The service is always available within the station's broadcast area, and some radios will even work on batteries when the power is out.  The readers are real live humans, not synthesized speech, which sounds unnatural and can be fatiguing to listeners.

Until cheap and fast internet access becomes universal and these services can be provided online through streaming audio, there will always be a place and a need for radio reading services.   With the shutdown of these services, blind and print-impaired citizens of Alabama are literally being left in the dark.